William Butler Yeats, the great Irish poet of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, was obsessed with Irish legends and the occult. The story behind his poem “A Dream of a Blessed Spirit” neatly encapsulates both ideas, since it concerns a mythic Irish character, the Countess Kathleen O’Shea, who sold all her goods and finally her soul to help her starving tenants. Because the Countess had given her soul for the good of others and not to enrich herself, God refused to let her be damned and instead brought her to heaven. Yeats also wrote a whole play about her, but it’s safe to say that it’s never performed these days. The poem, on the other hand, has provided the text for a lovely art song that is quite popular. My own group, the Cherry Creek Chorale in the Denver metro area, has programmed it several times. I found the words to be fascinating and puzzling:
All the heavy days are over;
Leave the body’s coloured pride
Underneath the grass and clover,
With the feet laid side by side
One with her are mirth and duty;
Bear the gold-embroidered dress,
For she needs not her sad beauty,
To the scented oaken press.
Hers the kiss of Mother Mary,
The long hair is on her face,
Still she goes with footsteps wary
Full of earth’s old timid grace.
With white feet of angels seven
Her white feet go glimmering;
And above the deep of heaven,
Flame on flame, and wing on wing.
It turns out that Yeats dedicated this poem to someone named “Maud Gonne” She was the great love of Yeats’ life and led him a merry dance, never accepting his proposals but not cutting him out of her life completely. Her involvement with Irish politics worried Yeats, as she often exhausted herself with the work of helping starving and evicted tenant farmers. Thus the parallel is clear between Maud and the legend of the Countess Kathleen.
The imagery in the poem shows us the Countess after death, as she did indeed waste away and die after selling her soul. I’m still a bit unclear about the phrase “the body’s coloured pride” and have found no explanation of it; why is the pride “coloured”? I’m guessing that the line is a reference to the idea that after death the body becomes gray and lifeless. The Countess is obviously in her grave, “underneath the grass and clover,” lying on her back with her feet sticking up, side by side. She’s now beyond either the mirth or the duties of life, and she no longer needs to wear rich clothes, including her “gold-embroidered dress.” Since she had sold all of her possessions to help the peasants, I don’t know why she even still has this item of clothing. But never mind! It may interest you to know that a “press” is an old name for what today we’d call a “wardrobe” or an “armoire.” I could go on and on with the etymology here but will restrain myself and say that storing clothes on a rod with hangers is fairly modern; clothes were typically stored folded and were therefore “pressed.” The Countess’s closet is made of oak and is “scented,” meaning that there were sachets of dried herbs and flowers hanging in it, probably to repel moths. The lines make better sense if you switch them to say: “Bear the gold-embroidered dress/To the scented oaken press,” but that change would mess up Yeats’ rhyme scheme.
So the above ideas wrap up the first two stanzas. The next verse describes the Countess as she’s being welcomed into heaven. She receives a kiss from Mary the mother of Jesus, who bends over the Countess to kiss her and whose hair tumbles down over the Countess’s face. Kathleen is still “wary,” though; she sold her soul, after all. Is she really welcome here in heaven? She’s as timid and graceful as she was on earth. The last stanza is a mystical vision of heaven. The seven angels have white feet, and so does she. Seven is the number of perfection; white is the color of purity. The “deep of heaven” is filled with angels’ wings—or are they flames? Both are true.
The musical setting for the poem comes from the Welsh lullaby “Suo Gân” and was written by the contemporary American choral composer/arranger Daniel J. Hall, who published the piece in 2006. Why did he use a Welsh melody for an Irish text? No clue. I looked at Hall’s website but don’t see any ideas there about his choice; it was probably one of those chance things. There he was, going about his business, and the first line of the poem popped into his head along with the first line of the tune. ‘Hey,’ he may have thought, ‘maybe I could write an arrangement putting the two together.’ I have an e-mail in to Dr. Hall asking him for further information; if he responds I’ll come back and revise this paragraph.Here’s a good performance with an intro giving the story about the Countess and conducted by Z. Randall Stroope, about whose music I’ve also written on this site:
And here’s a performance of the original Welsh lullaby by a boy soprano–it’s pretty magical:
If your appetite for literary analysis has not been sated, I will direct you to “The Blessed Damozel” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, written about 60 years before Yeats’ poem. If you read the Rossetti poem you’ll see some very strong resemblances between the two. Did Yeats borrow from the earlier poem? I think he must have but perhaps unconsciously, as Rossetti’s literary style, the “Pre-Raphaelite,” was sort of in the air for quite awhile:
The poem is quite long but very beautiful. I’m kind of mildly obsessed with it. Note that the illustration for this post is of said damozel and not of the Countess Kathleen, of which there don’t seem to be any compelling images online. And yes, Rossetti both wrote the poem and painted the picture. Quite the guy!
© Debi Simons
